Saturday, July 17, 2010

Cuba - Life free from oil

Cuba without oil... It means independence, interdependance on others in the economy, organic food, and more jobs.

It reminds me of the time I was in India and the mom n pop restaurants had no refrigerator. Now, one would think it quite a negative. It's actually the opposite. The food tasted much better! It had to come in fresh and be prepared right away!

So why have we moved to food being shipped across the country and around the world. Not only that, the food is highly processed and in a lot of cases frozen. Why didn't this happen 50 years ago? It's because of cheap oil and cheap mechanical toys.

If oil and gas went up 10x in price tomorrow, local and organic would certainly be in fashion. After all, shipping something 10 miles is a lot of more cost effective than shipping something 10000 miles. Not only that, fertilizer from fossil fuels becomes expensive. Suddenly, that banana peel and compost becomes valuable. Tending to a large corporate farm becomes infeasible as manual labor is much cheaper than maintaining a tractor and running it. This means more jobs become available. And everyone becomes interconnected as everyone is dependent on everyone else. Suddenly, people have more vale.

[Video] Cuba's independence from oil

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